Harlan Ellison, one of the masters of science fiction and a Southern California pop-culture icon, died in his sleep in his Sherman Oaks home Wednesday. He was 84.

Ellison was a superstar writer who was credited with bringing a sharp, counterculture undertow to the genre, crafting such classic stories as “’Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman,” “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” and the ultimate California road-rage tale, “Along the Scenic Route” (a.k.a. “Dogfight on 101”). He won eight Hugo, four Nebula, five Bram Stoker, two Edgar and two World Fantasy Awards for his writing in various genres.

“Harlan wanted science fiction to be more aggressive, more experimental and in the 1960s he and other writers started doing science fiction which was more modern,” noted Yucca Valley resident James Van Hise, who published and edited a special Ellison edition of his science fiction and comic book fanzine Rocket’s Blast in 1980. “ ‘Repent, Harlequin!’ was easily one of Harlan’s best stories, and it was completely different from what anybody else was doing.”

Ellison was also a prolific and acclaimed television writer, whose several Writers Guild Award-winning episodes include the original “Star Trek’s” “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Other notable chapters were “The Alfred Hitchcock Hour’s” semi-autobiographical “Memo from Purgatory” and “The Outer Limits’” and “Demon with a Glass Hand.”

In a high-profile squabble, Ellison sued the producers of James Cameron’s “The Terminator,” accusing them of plagiarizing his story “Soldier.” They settled for an undisclosed amount and a home-video-edition credit acknowledging Ellison’s works, though Cameron has always maintained his movie was totally original.

That was Harlan. His reputation for innovative storytelling was matched in many minds by his bent for contentiousness, his affection for speaking (his) truth and and his litigiousness (and he won several other Hollywood lawsuits). He nonetheless denied that latter label — quite emphatically, as was his way — several times when I spoke with him over the years.

We weren’t really friends; I got to know him when I was working in the mid-1980s at a Chatsworth-based, fanboy magazine publisher while the between-some-of-his-five-marriages Ellison was dating one of my colleagues.

He’d come around and was always cordial and respectful to the staff, most of whom worshiped him. He liked that but never lorded it over anyone, and was generous with writing tips whenever asked (which was, like, always).

Ellison did have opinions about pretty much everything, though — including politics, just about anybody else’s creative work and perceived ethics – and he wasn’t shy about sharing them. He reveled in it, actually.

When I’d run into him at movie screenings over the ensuing decades — yes, he even got paid to do film criticism — there was inevitably a lively post-show conversation in which he never failed to drop insights I usually didn’t agree with, but never would have considered on my own and that, mostly, tended to expand my understanding of what we’d just seen.

When Van Hise met with him for the magazine project a typical exchange ensued.

“When I interviewed Harlan in 1980 I mentioned that I had met him at a convention a few years before,” the publisher recalled. “He said, ‘Was I decent to you?’ I said yes.”

Going to the home in the Sherman Oaks hills that its owner called Ellison Wonderland was a fanboy’s dream, too.

“Harlan was a collector, he collected all of his life,” Van Hise explained. “He still had all of the comic books he bought when he was a kid. He had original art for the covers of a lot of the books that he had written. It was on the walls of his house, with work from artists he’d meet and really liked. There were sculptures all over his house; there was, like, a six-foot-tall gargoyle of some kind. He would constantly remodel and expand the house from what it was when he bought it back in the ’60s.”

More generous than his cantankerous personality may have indicated, Ellison let friends sell some of his valuable collector’s items when they launched the Blastoff Comics store in North Hollywood in 2012. He also appeared at their grand opening. Earlier, he often showed up at the long-gone Dangerous Visions sci-fi bookstore in Sherman Oaks, which was named as a tribute to the groundbreaking short-story anthology Ellison edited.

Ellison famously wrote an entire story one day in Dangerous Visions’ window, a stunt he pulled at other bookstores as well.

Born and raised in Ohio, Ellison began running away from home as a teenager and claimed to have done many, often dangerous, odd jobs before selling his first stories in the late 1940s and early ’50s, including one to the legendary EC Comics.

After writing hundreds of pieces, he moved to L.A. in 1962. The story goes that he was fired on his first day of work at Walt Disney Studios for making irreverent suggestions.

Ellison wrote scripts for such shows as “Route 66,” “The Flying Nun” and “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea,” as well as for the so-howlingly-bad-it-was-great inside Hollywood movie “The Oscar.” His post-apocalyptic novella “A Boy and His Dog” was made into a cult favorite 1975 movie starring Don Johnson.

Bob Straus has been covering film at the L.A. Daily News since 1989. He wouldn't say the movies have gotten worse in that time, but they do keep getting harder to love. Fortunately, he still loves them.